Pak Suparman starts each day by crawling out of the cart in which he has been huddled up for the better part of the night. The cart is his most treasured possession. It not only serves as his bed at night (without which he would be completely exposed to the elements) but is also the means with which he earns his living.

Suparman is a trash picker, and his entire day is spent pushing his cart along Jakarta’s streets in search of garbage.

The waste others throw out is anything but worthless to Suparman, and constitutes his only means of income. Suparman not only goes through rubbish bins in search of plastic gold, but also picks up any rubbish of any worth that he finds. Truth be known, were it not for people like Suparman, Jakartans might soon find themselves knee-deep in waste.

Suparman earns anything from Rp 100,000 a week (if unfortunate) to Rp 250,000 in a good week. His bread and butter is plastic water bottles of any size. Clean plastic fetches him Rp 5,000 per kilogram, while soiled or dirty plastic fetches Rp 2,000 per kilo. Any other kind of garbage is worth Rp 1,500 per kilogram.

Once a week Suparman takes all that he has collected to larger-scale garbage collectors (known as kontrakan), in Pintu Air, Tanah Abang, who in turn sell it to factories that produce containers and packaging. However, these larger-scale collectors did not wish to reveal their identities or say how much they earned as middle-men, claiming ignorance and stating that only the “top boss” knew how much factories paid for garbage.